The Chart I Should Not Own
The man came down the pontoon at Marina Taina carrying a cardboard tube the way other men carry a rifle, with the strap slung diagonally across his chest and one hand laid flat on it, and I knew before he had said a word that he was going to try to pay me more than the boat was worth.
I was on the aft deck of *Maeva*, sitting with a coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier and a list of provisioning notes I had already memorised, because in April there is very little to do in Papeete except wait out the last of the rainy season and pretend the paperwork for next month's charters is urgent. The tradewinds had not settled yet. The lagoon had that flat, slightly greasy look it gets when the sky cannot decide, and a squall was building west over Moorea that would probably not reach us but would keep every yacht at Taina uneasy for the afternoon.
He stopped at the stern and read the name on the transom before he looked at me, which I appreciated. Most of them look at the boat or they look at the captain and never both.
"Captain Solis," he said. "Ridley Manning. We spoke by email."
I had him placed before he spoke. The email had been long, careful, and written in the register of a man who had been told once by an assistant how to write to a charter captain and had kept the template ever since. Four weeks, he had said. Flexible dates. A slow itinerary into the Tuamotus, followed